


One Way Ride

by Tyellas



Series: History is hard to know [1]
Category: Mad Max Series (Movies)
Genre: Action/Adventure, Backstory, Bikers, Canon-Typical Violence, Environmentalism, Gen, Gyrocopter Cameo, Implied/Referenced Rape/Non-con, Post-Nuclear War, Roadbuilding, Things go BOOM, for resilient readers, may trigger
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2016-02-29
Updated: 2016-02-29
Packaged: 2018-05-23 22:31:33
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: Graphic Depictions Of Violence
Chapters: 1
Words: 2,645
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/6132244
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Tyellas/pseuds/Tyellas
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>A look back to an earlier time in the Mad Max ‘verse. The post-nuclear climate is crashing. The Outback’s civilized holdouts are a target for motorcycle gangs. And a companion of Miss Giddy witnesses her weakness, her strength, and what one spark of vengeance can bring…</p>
            </blockquote>





	One Way Ride

The van nobody liked driving was rattling back from the job nobody had wanted to do: confirming that Swampgum River was dead.

It was Travis’ turn to drive. Alan let his rifle rest across his knees to rub the furrowed spot between his brows. He had wanted to bring some of the next generation along on the scouting trip. They needed to know how the world had changed, why their Outback settlement had become so important. (And it wasn’t a bush childhood without some camping.) But he had been overruled: it was too risky, nowadays. Two middle-aged men could be spared. With the trip’s dismal results, it turned out that had been for the best.

Alan’s deep, cultivated voice tried out the bad news. “Day 4,895 since the bombs. Day 1,864 since it rained. Bushlife sightings: minimal. Swampgum River dry at the source – artesian water only until the Nuke Dry breaks.”

Travis shook his head. “Mate. You make it sound like…” He paused, for three perfect seconds. “ _The end of the world!_ ” Alan huffed a laugh at their threadbare injoke. He caught his own grey eyes in the rear-view and thought, for a moment, his father was in the van with them. No, that was his own face. The Nuke Dry's sun had rendered him wiry and creased at forty-five.

Travis noted, “Magpie on the right _._ ” There was a black-and-white flash as the solitary bird winged past.

A familiar line of trees hove into view. Everyone who was anyone in the region knew what was behind the trees. Kulurda Station was where you went to barter for ethanol fuel. They’d picked up a biofuel still when the oil wars were leading news - when there was news. After nuclear war shattered Australia into thousands of scattered settlements, they'd kept their generators and vehicles running, thanks to fuel brewed from fermented eucalyptus chips. The hectares around had been thinning out of people, but those that remained were coming further and further to fill their tanks, too, at Kulurda.

For how much longer? As they neared the tree-lined border, the shadows were growing longer. Dead eucalyptus leaves spiralled down and out to meet them. The long leaves were the most delicate grey touched with green, shedding constantly, always a handful of them falling. In their isolation, nobody could say how much nuclear summer drought it took to kill the station’s namesake trees. Alan had an unpleasant feeling they would be finding out soon. It was easier to distill ethanol from thoroughly dry wood, but the thought of mining a dead, standing forest…

The eastern entrance to the inner hectares was within sight. Alan lifted the rifle. “I’ll jump out and do the gate.”

Travis frowned. He tapped his mahogany-tanned hand on the wheel, a warning cadence. “Gate’s open.”

Their eyes met. For a hundred and fifty years, the first rule of Kulurda Station had been: _close the bloody gate_.

Travis took them off road to a screeching halt. Alan snapped the safety off his rifle and shouldered it. A few leaves danced against the chipped windshield.

They waited.

When the dust of their drive died down, they could see the unsealed road. It was coursed with tracks upon tracks. Travis clicked his tongue. His New Zealand accent was better for bad news, Alan always thought: somewhere between soft and blunt. “Bikies and a truck or two. Looks like they turned from the south road.” The road from the bombed-out city. Its denizens detaching at last, starting the clamber up the coast. Desperate enough for the long, dry trek into the heart of the Murchison. Travis had picked up on the terms Kulurda's visitors were using. “Could be traders. Could be raiders.”

The pair contemplated the spiralling leaves: the road: the thin music of the gate, swinging from its own weight, breaking the law of the country.

“I need to know. Do you.” He looked over at Travis, thoughtfully holding the green jade pendant he always wore between two fingers. This wasn’t his family; wasn’t his country. “Do you want out?”

Travis quirked his mouth. “If trouble’s here, there’s not enough out in this Outback.”

Alan sighed. "There's not enough thanks."

After they went through, Alan closed the gate.

* * *

They crept into the centre of the old farming station after dark. The guest cottages were empty and silent. Even the one where Alan, as a member of the owning family, had packed in Travis and three other university colleagues. But the heart of Kulurda was throbbing with too much life.

The central Edwardian farmhouse was lit up like a bonfire. Every lamp that had a working bulb was on. The raiders were rejoicing in power.

They hadn’t touched the ethanol yet, though Alan had found the biofuel shed door open. Tonight, the raiders were partying. They were confident that Kulurda was theirs for the looting.

Alan couldn’t say they were wrong. A black fence of machines surrounded the jarrah front door – at least thirty cycles, a minivan, and a panel truck. They didn't seem to be from that paramilitary Holy Joe lot who’d clamped down on the Pilbara. Nothing was military, especially not the truck, covered in demented graffiti. Besides, traders' rumor had it that the last thing that lot needed was fuel. Alan slid circuitously around the western side of the house, and reapproached out of the family graveyard, between the netted aisles of fruit trees, towards a side verandah.

The night was cold: the bikers' revels had moved indoors. Alan glimpsed threatening silhouettes in the dining room and his father’s study. Music was shattering the night. The raiders had been there long enough to figure out how his dad’s huge, ancient stereo worked: not a good sign. CD players and online music had died in the nuclear EMP waves, but the black monolith and the crates of vinyl around it rocked on, giving their lives a 70s soundtrack. The raiders were enjoying an Ocker classic, _Highway to Hell_ at maximum scratchy volume, until someone jerked the needle away. Alan caught some bickering, and someone barking an order. The B side of _Back in Black_ began to play.

_Forget the hearse, ‘cause I never die. I got nine lives, cat eyes, abusing every one of them and running wild…_

Despite the noise, Alan tried not to rustle in the strips and drifts of dead eucalyptus bark too near the house. The bark was a fire hazard, waiting tinder in the Nuke Dry, cleared daily. So: the raiders had been here at least a day. Suddenly, an empty bottle was thrown out an open French door, to bounce and gleam. Alan winced as the bottle rolled to his feet: one of his dad’s hoarded Australian single malts, rolling drained. He seized it without thinking.

_Look at me now, I’m just makin’ my play, don’t try to push your luck, just get out of my way…_

At the tiny gap of silence between album songs, Alan stood still. Crude cheers and a piercing scream came from the house – and, too close to him, he heard a rustle in the eucalyptus bark. He tucked the bottle under one arm to grip his rifle. The rustle was lost as the music picked up. He dared to crouch closer. Just outside the range of the house lights, there was the curve of a woman’s back, a glimpse of a nearly-pretty face worn sharp by hard years. He knew that nose. “Sophia,” he hissed. The next best thing to family was someone else from the university - was he too late?  “Sophia Giddy!”

_She was the best damn woman that I’d ever seen, had the sightless eyes, telling me no lies…_

If you’d asked him fifteen years ago to choose who, out of all his acquaintances, would survive an apocalypse, Sophia Giddy wouldn’t have made his cut. Travis’ flighty flatmate, darting from café to bookstore to cabaret show, “on sabbatical” from her wildly irrelevant literature Ph.D. And yet, on that night when the atom bombs scorched the world, she had fled with them, to the refuge of Alan’s family station.

Even in its isolation, Kulurda had suffered. Exile and fallout drift and climate crash took their toll. Strong men and tough sheilas had hung themselves, choked on tumors, wailed in the night. Sophia hadn’t. She had been one of those to keep the place civilized, with calm words and witty distractions and gentle hands. Now, she had survived the raid – he hoped.

Alan went flat on the ground beside her. At the awkward moment when he caught that she reeked of blood and sex, her eyes opened. Her eyeglasses were missing. “Alan,” she breathed. “Your dad _would_ try, said he always got on with bikies…but there’s no talking to this lot.” She coughed. He caught pale skin, slight cleavage and more, and looked away. “Gone mad. Out for what they can get before they die, too. Perth is down to the bones. Shell and Shar got out with vehicles and the kids.”

“What direction?”

“I’m not sure. _They’re_ planning a hunt tomorrow.” Alan thought of the tracks they’d followed to the house so easily.

He sniffed. Meat was burning. “Which of the stock got the knock for the barbie?”

“They didn’t kill stock. That’s not the meat they’re used to.”

He went rigid in appalled realisation.

_Made a meal out of me, and come back for more…_

Sophia glanced beyond him and gasped in fear. From the open French door, a man’s shadow stretched towards them. “Oi, wassat?” He drew some firearm and swayed forwards.

Getting on with bikies? No talking to this lot? Alan wedged closer to Sophia, lifted the bottle between them to obscure their faces, and roared, rough as guts, “LEMME SHAG, YA FUCKIN’ CUNT!” Beside him, Sophia flinched in horror – he had to fling a leg over her to pin her still.

The biker tilted the firearm away to howl through laughter, “Go on, ya root rat!” He reeled back inside.

Alan released her. “Sorry. I'm so sorry.”

Sophia elbowed Alan’s rifle back into him and hissed, “Why didn’t you kill him?”

“I’m trying to save your life! You were escaping!”

“I,” she said, “was making my way to the biofuel.” Sophia opened a clenched hand. This fastidious woman held something she’d valued more than her modesty: a dented metal lighter, engraved with a skull. “Perhaps the hunt will be cancelled.”

Alan heard the purr-and-rattle of the old university van behind the graveyard. He clenched Sophia again, to hold her as she prepared to flee. “Travis. Been fueling up. Thought we’d see how bad it was, then go bush and decide what to do. But your idea....is it that…”

“All you Mathiesons - down. Five others still breathing.” She added, bitterly, “The biker gang is looking good to some of them.”

His mistakes of the last three days stabbed him. It was all here, now, the last turn of the spiral down for humanity. He should have packed the damn van with kids, should have fucked up their damn bikes, should have shot to kill. Sophia had been right.

Sophia was still right. Alan said, “Burn the place down, with them in it…can you make it a hundred meters?” She nodded.

They finished the crawl through the Kulurda graveyard. He took the empty bottle with them.

It took one minute to relocate to the cluster of work sheds. Thirty seconds for him to open the valves on the old water tanks, repurposed for ethanol storage. Another minute to make a Molotov cocktail in the whiskey bottle, as he crouched with Sophia in the rear of the van, back doors open. Travis had the engine running. Sophia’s clothes, half cut off her, made ready rags. It turned out the lighter was dead or empty, a talisman. Thousands of match-free days made Alan a fast hand at starting a spot of fire in the lid of his flint kit.

He held the bottle near the tin lid of fire, its rag wick dangling, and stopped. They should let the remaining stock out, if they hadn’t keeled over from dehydration. Raid a few supplies for themselves, from the outbuildings. See if anyone else was alive, worth saving. This was Kulurda. This was madness. There had to be a way -

The tinder fire reflected in wide, watching eyes. Sophia levered up, with a pained look. “Give it to me.” Her blood-laced hand plucked the Molotov cocktail from his knotted, frozen fingers.

Silently, she dipped the fuse in the fire, let it burn longer than he would have. Then, she lobbed it, weakly. Into shadows and throbbing sound, towards the ethanol spill.

_Come on, all the boys, make a noise, have a drink on me…_

It seemed to fall well short. Still, frail from the heat, the bottle shattered in a spill of fire. A skirl of eucalyptus bark whirled away, burning, and brushed another piece. In a breath, a fragile net of fire spun along the bark lacing the dead-dry ground. As one length twisted, it trailed into the gleam of spilling ethanol. Whiteness flared in the night.

Alan finally slammed the back doors shut. “Drive! Or we’re history!”

Kulurda had drawn some barterers peddling odd services, recently. Alan had liked a quirky bloke with a gyrocopter, and his cheerful son, enough to swap ethanol for a quick lift into the sky. From above, the heart of Kulurda’s hectares was a long, long bar of bush forest along the Swampgum River, bitten into by sand drifts from the north, going dry and thin in the south. Today, with the river dry and the rainless sky, wildfire would take it. Then, nothing would block the desert from sweeping down the coast…

Alan wasn’t sure it would happen until hot white light flashed behind them. The ethanol explosion blasted their ears, rocked the ground. Travis stopped them, cursing frantically. The air around the van came alive, sucked towards the blaze. Alan peered out the back. The white fire was enduring.

"Dear God," Sophia moaned.

She continued. _"Some say the world will end in fire, some say in ice. From what I’ve tasted of desire, I hold with those who favour fire…_ ” Sophia elbowed herself off the van floor. “One thing to think it, another to…bring it about.” She swept tears away, took a deep breath, and sat upright.

“You two good to get in some seats?” Travis called back. “Don’t want the cops stopping us ‘cause you haven’t got seat belts on. Al, up here with the rifle, and pass Soph the cane cutter from the back?”

These two were alive, shaming him with their endurance and humor: they were his last chance to not fail. Alan peeled off his khaki overvest, wrapped it around Sophia’s shoulders, and hustled them towards the front. Smoke drowned out every other scent. The light coming in the back of the van had deepened to red-orange. They moved. Travis took them in the opposite direction from the fire. Alan said nothing to direct him. _Away_ was as good as it got, tonight. They could piece it all together when they knew they'd survived.

 _Away_ took them to Kulurda’s south gate. Throughout the hour's drive, the horizon stayed red, the light following them. Travis took the van at a crawl while Alan leapt out the side door, opened the gate, and let them through. He pulled the gate with him as he followed, felt its closing click shut his heart. Leaping back into the van was easy, between terror and a sense that nothing had any gravity.

They drove on: fire on the horizon behind them, the apocalypse’s darkness ahead. The last records he’d hear for a very long time still clashed in Alan’s memory. _A one way ride_ , he thought. _On the highway to hell._

**Author's Note:**

>  _Kulurda_ – The Noongar/Australian Aboriginal name for swampgum or flooded gum, a type of eucalyptus tree.  
>  Hectare – 2.47 acres, the land measurement used for Australian farming stations.  
> Unsealed road – Dirt road, i.e., no asphalt seal.  
> Jarrah – A luxurious type of wood.  
> Stock – Livestock, farm animals.  
>  _Some say the world will end in fire, some say in ice. From what I’ve tasted of desire, I hold with those who favour fire…_ from the poem _Fire and Ice_ , Robert Frost.  
> Cane cutter - Referring here to a type of machete.  
> Much of the action takes place to the first three songs of the B side of AC/DC’s _Back to Black_ album. Lyrics are from Back to Black, You Shook Me All Night Long, and Have a Drink.


End file.
